Revival Review: Wausau’s Walking Dead Offer More Than Brains

In the unassuming Midwestern town of Wausau, Wisconsin, the fundamental laws of existence have fractured. The dead have begun to return. This is not the familiar, groaning apocalypse of shuffling corpses or the frenetic terror of a viral plague; it is something quieter, more unnervingly intimate.

The event, quickly named “Revival Day,” reintroduces the recently deceased to their old lives, their memories and personalities seemingly untouched. These “revivers,” as they come to be known, are not monsters hungry for flesh but people hungry for normalcy, bearing one unsettling distinction: they are now functionally immortal, their bodies capable of regenerating from any new injury. They are, quite simply, themselves—only now, they cannot die.

At the center of this quiet upheaval is Officer Dana Cypress, a single mother whose plans to escape the town’s gravitational pull are abruptly cancelled. The government-mandated quarantine traps her, forcing her back into the uniform she was ready to discard and into a web of strange occurrences.

The resulting conflict is not one of survival against a horde, but of a community forced to look at itself when the line between life and death has been irrevocably blurred. For Dana, the town’s mystery becomes deeply personal, threatening to unravel not just its fragile peace but her own family.

The Mundane Miraculous

The series establishes its unique catastrophe with an almost bureaucratic specificity. The miracle, or curse, is not universal; it is confined to Wausau and restricted to those who perished within a narrow two-week window. The resurrected return with a potent healing factor, rendering them impervious to new harm, though the injuries that first killed them can remain as grim souvenirs. It is a selective, localized rewriting of natural law.

A more telling creative decision is the narrative leap forward by 35 days, bypassing the initial panic to deposit the viewer directly into the unsettling quiet of the aftermath. This choice sidesteps the spectacle of discovery for the far more textured drama of adjustment, focusing on a world where the impossible has already happened and now must simply be lived with.

This new reality unfolds within a community under federal quarantine. The town is a sealed terrarium, with CDC scientists acting as both researchers and reluctant wardens. The atmosphere is thick with a tension born not of immediate danger, but of profound social awkwardness and simmering resentment.

The living and the once-dead attempt a fragile coexistence, navigating the minefield of daily life. Children sit beside reviver classmates, families attend funerals for people who refuse to stay buried, and the entire social fabric is rewoven with threads of fear and confusion. This is where the apocalypse reveals its true nature: not as a violent end, but as a slow, bewildering transformation of the everyday into something deeply strange.

Wausau’s Living Ghosts

The narrative is anchored by Dana Cypress, a character brought to life with a compelling blend of wit and weariness by Melanie Scrofano. She is the reluctant fulcrum of the story, a competent officer whose professional duties are hopelessly tangled with her personal history. Through her, we navigate the town’s escalating strangeness; her blend of no-nonsense capability and raw vulnerability makes her a grounded guide in a world that has lost its footing.

Her gravitational center is complicated by her family, particularly her younger sister, Em. Positioned as the troubled black sheep grappling with addiction, Em embodies a more immediate mystery: she is herself a reviver, yet possesses no memory of her own death, making her a walking, breathing enigma at the heart of the central plot.

Opposing them both in spirit is their father, Sheriff Wayne Cypress, a figure of rigid authority whose answer to the inexplicable is control. His push for registration and containment of the revivers is a clear allegory for fear-based governance, a man trying to impose old-world order on a phenomenon that defies it.

Beyond the Cypress family, the world is populated by figures who color the town’s response to its new reality. Dr. Ibrahim Ramin, the CDC scientist, serves as a necessary foil—a man of reason and process whose burgeoning, sweetly awkward chemistry with Dana provides a flicker of warmth amidst the encroaching darkness.

The broader community is a sketch of small-town archetypes thrown into chaos: quirky locals, a vicious family of drug dealers whose business is disrupted by the quarantine, and most ominously, the populist radio host Blaine Abel. He gathers a militia of the fearful, his rhetoric weaponizing the town’s anxiety and transforming the revivers from neighbors into demons, representing the inevitable slide from confusion into organized hatred.

Noir, Wit, and Lens Flare

To label Revival a simple horror series would be a disservice to its curious and shifting identity. It operates as a hybrid, weaving together the investigative threads of a rural noir with the fraught dynamics of a family drama, all under a constant canopy of supernatural suspense.

The primary engine is not a fight for survival but a search for answers; the central mystery of the revivers’ origin and purpose drives the plot forward more than any immediate physical threat. This focus on sleuthing over screaming gives the series a texture that is more intellectually engaging than viscerally frightening.

What truly prevents the premise from collapsing under its own grim weight is a surprising and deftly handled sense of humor. This levity is not broad or farcical but stems organically from the characters, particularly Dana Cypress, whose wry, sarcastic wit serves as a necessary defense mechanism against the sheer absurdity of her reality.

Her humor is a shield against the encroaching strangeness, a way of maintaining sanity. The series cleverly weaponizes this comedic tone, using moments of lightheartedness to disarm the viewer, which makes the sudden, sharp punctuation of a jump scare all the more effective. It is a dynamic rhythm of laughter and fear.

Visually, the series aspires to a cinematic polish, employing stylistic flourishes like lens flares to add a layer of sheen to its small-town setting. Yet, this ambition is often counteracted by a familiar dimness, a washed-out and murky lighting palette common in modern television that can obscure detail and mute the intended atmosphere rather than enhance it. The look is one of polished grit, caught between a desire for aesthetic flair and the constraints of its medium.

Echoes of the Other

Beneath its supernatural surface, the series is a potent allegory for social division. The reviver becomes the quintessential “Other,” a canvas onto which the living project their deepest anxieties. The fear of the unknown quickly curdles into discrimination, as the resurrected are transformed from neighbors into a category, a problem to be managed. This exploration of bigotry is not subtle, but its power lies in its familiarity.

The rhetoric of suspicion, the calls for registration, the casual cruelty of schoolyard bullies—all are recognizable echoes of historical and contemporary prejudice. The show uses its fantastical premise to hold a mirror to the mundane mechanisms of marginalization, showing how easily a community can turn on its own when confronted with something it does not understand.

This central conflict plays out on both an institutional and personal level. The ideological battle is personified in the clash between Sheriff Wayne’s iron-fisted desire for control and Dr. Ramin’s appeal to science and reason. One sees a threat to be contained; the other, a phenomenon to be understood. This official debate refracts through the intimate, painful questions faced by the town’s citizens.

The premise unearths profound philosophical quandaries: What is the emotional toll on a widow whose husband died one day too late to be returned? Does a criminal who has technically “died” owe any further debt to society? The series is at its most compelling when it explores these smaller, more intimate fissures in the social contract, where the grand, supernatural event becomes a deeply personal crisis of faith, grief, and justice.

A Restless Narrative

The show’s storytelling engine is one of relentless forward motion. It is a multi-threaded narrative that continuously spins out new subplots—from Dana’s core criminal investigation to Em’s personal quest for memory, to the rise of a nascent doomsday cult. This constant churn keeps the plot from ever feeling static, zipping past its weaker points on the way to the next cliffhanger.

Yet, this narrative velocity comes at a price. The sheer volume of mysteries and characters means that few are afforded the space to develop significant depth. Plot threads are introduced and then left to dangle, and character motivations can feel more beholden to narrative necessity than to organic emotional growth, resulting in a watch that is broad but often superficial.

This feeling is compounded by foundational structural choices that raise more questions than they answer. The decision to leap 35 days past the initial event creates a world where much of the immediate, raw drama has happened off-screen, leaving the viewer to piece together the rules of this new society.

Those rules themselves are sometimes vaguely defined, particularly concerning the revivers’ abilities, leading to minor but noticeable inconsistencies in the world-building. For every compelling question the series poses, others are simply hand-waved away, leaving a structure that feels both intriguing and slightly unsteady.

Full Credits

Director(s): Amanda Row

Writers: Aaron B. Koontz, Luke Boyce, Michael Moreci

Producers: Evan Ottoni, Szonja Jakovits, Ryan Plachcinski

Executive Producers: Amanda Row, Melanie Scrofano, Stephen Foster, Greg Hemmings, Daniel March, Daniel Iron, Neil Tabatznik, Samantha Levine, Lance Samuels, Luke Boyce, Aaron B. Koontz

Cast: Melanie Scrofano, Romy Weltman, David James Elliott, Andy McQueen, Hudson Wurster, Gianpaolo Venuta, Maia Jae, Mark Little, Glen Gould, Nathan Dales, Lenore Zann, Katharine King So, Nicky Guadagni, Graeme Barrett, Derek McGrath, Nora McLellan, Conrad Coates, Peter Millard, Brandon Oakes, Josh Cruddas, Karen Knox, Steven Ogg, CM Punk, Gia Sandhu, Lara Jean Chorostecki

Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Justin Black, Martin Wojtunik

Editors: Mark Hussey, Curt Lobb

Composer(s): Lydia Ainsworth, Alex Cuervo